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Hierarchy
The Hierarchy Governing Body: The Overseers Known Leaders: Orlok the Eternal, Nufai, Kamal Re'x the Abductor Military Strength: Unknown, presumed significant Empire Size: Significant Goal: Unknown (presumed "cull" weak races), to harvest all useful materials on earth (harvesting force). Tactical Dynamic Hardpoint system on their walkers/mobile structures :"The '''Hierarchy' is greater than one mere battle! Our empire stretches further than your galaxy has stars!"'' -Kamal Re'x, detailing the extent of Hierarchy rule The Hierarchy is an intergalactic alien empire whose mining force serves as the initial alien invaders in the first installment of the Universe at War series. History The original Hierarchy race was saved by the Masari from inevitable extinction over ten millenia ago when they were given the technology needed to survive. However, the Hierarchy ancestors showed zero kindness for their saviors and turned against the Masari, wiping out all but one city ship. The Hierarchy, then, went on to become the dominating force in the galaxy, invading countless other planets in the universe and exterminating the inhabiting races, such as the creators of Novus and the Skinwalkers. At the beginning of Earth Assault, the Hierarchy invades Earth with the intent to strip-mine the entire planet of valuable resources, including organic life. Initially, the Hierarchy crushes the human resistance, but the underseer of the mining fleet (Kamal Re'x) delays standard procedure of "Purifying" the planet in order to set a trap for Novus, who follow the Hierarchy fleets to cause as much mayhem as possible to their harvesting operations. As predicted, Novus soon arrived and began to cause trouble around the globe. Eventually, Novus managed to force their way into a Hierarchy Material Uplink teleportation system and teleport their field commander, Mirabel to one of their command ships. However, it is soon revealed that Kamal Re'x had allowed this and had arranged for the ship to self-destruct with the intent of taking Mirabel out with it. Meanwhile on the planet's surface, Kamal had sent a massive invasion force to the Middle East to assault the global headquarters of Novus, but Mirabel managed to escape the demise planned for her and alerted the Founder of the impending assault. Despite a force of 2 Assembly Walkers, 2 Habitat Walkers, 3 Science Walker's fitted with Radiation Cascade generators and an army of Grunts and Defilers, Novus managed to defend their base. As the last Walker collapsed, it launched a plasma blast which managed to destabalize the Novus Home Portal, causing the Founder to sacrifice himself to save the planets on both ends. After this costly victory, Kamal Re'x personally examined the graveyard of machines while plotting the final demise of the Hierarchy's greatest foe. He then tasked Orlok the Eternal to prepare for the Purification of the planet. It is unknown what happened after the fall of Kamal Rex, it is assumed the Hierarchy would resume their invasion on Earth but this time would be no easy task as the human have the alliance with the Masari and the Novus not to mention the majority of their technologies are now in the human reach to reverse-engineer. Play style The Hierarchy takes on the role of a powerhouse faction in Earth Assault. Their basic tactic consists of straight forward assaults and sieges with Walkers, tough units, and additional reinforcments built right into the fight. They apply extreme pressure on the offensive to keep opponents reacting to the onslaught of their forces. Rather than build structures to build units, the Hierarchy instead drops giant walkers equipped with teleportation systems that allow Hardpoints to be built on the walker's frame (modifying their capabilities) and bring down troops from orbiting ships. This allows for great versatility as a walker can fitted for assault(with weapon, rate of fire, and range enhancement hard points), production (with unit "Pods", cost reduction and build speed hardpoints), siege (Beam Cannons or Radiation Artillery), even superweapons (Cascade Reactors/Radiation Cascade) or any combination of these. Most Hierarchy units are designed with the intention of escorting the walkers into battle rather than fighting alone and most of them have some sort of area of effect to their attack (for example, the Hierarchy Grunt is armed with a plasma shotgun that can hit multiple foes per attack). The Hierarchy also make heavy use of Radiation Weapons, Phasing Abilities, and Mind-Control Technology. Heroes *Kamal Re'x the Abductor *Orlok the Eternal *Nufai Tech trees *Mutagen - Enhances radiation effects and provides powerful anti-turtle weapons. *Quantum - Provides access to advanced technologies (such as mind control) and upgrades. *Assault - Focuses on infantry/walker upgrades and long range attacks (Orlok, Range Enhancers). Strengths * Walkers replace the functions of base structures, creating a near fully mobile army. * Walkers can simply smash through enemy defenses and crush nearly any structure or unit underfoot. * Walkers have customizable upgrade hardpoints. * Monoliths, an excellent scout/harassment unit, can be built from their command center * The Hierarchy can collect almost anything as raw materials, including buildings, cars, humans, cows, infantry corpses, Walker remains, etc. * The Hierarchy production walkers can produce 3 units of the same kind at once, meaning a walker can produce 15 units per queue. * The Hierarchy has the most rapid healing and repair capabilities of all three factions, thanks to the Defiler and Saucer. The healing abilities of both can be upgraded. * Research suites have multiple damage upgrades for various units. * Reaper Drones allow for immediate and highly mobile resource collection Weaknesses * The Hierarchy economy greatly benefits from the presence of "insta grabs" (light objects that can be harvested instantly, such as organics or Lamp posts). If a map has few or no insta grabs the Hierarchy will have some difficultly competing with the faster economies of Novus and the Masari. * While walkers are powerful, they are an extremely expensive and important asset that will not last long in combat without hardpoint upgrades or an escort of some kind. * Hierarchy structures must, in effect, be built twice. First the Glyph Carver must cut the glyph for the structure/walker in the ground (during which a single shot from anything will destroy it) and then one must wait for the glyph to be scanned. * The Hierarchy only has one Superweapon without research since the other (Radiation Cascade) requires Mutagen Suite 4 . * The Hierarchy has the slight problem of only having 3 possible production structures (45 units per queue) compared to the 5 each for the other factions (25 infantry, 25 vehicles, and 25 aircraft, or 75 units per queue). Generally a Hierarchy player will only have one of each walker, bringing the amount of units produced down to 30 (and even still, it's only 15 vehicles and 15 infantry). * Aircraft are an issue for The Hierarchy, requiring Arc Generator Hardpoints (available via research), Saucers, Monoliths, Lost Ones (available via Habitat Walker Hardpoint) or Nufai's Tendrils to be dealt with. * The Hierarchy is vulnerable to early rushes because they cannot build early units (except Monoliths and Turrets) and the glyphs are a very vulnerable part of their army, so hide your early game Walker glyph carving away from your base Trivia * The Hierarchy was created as a faction after the developers noticed how much people liked fighting the capital ships from their previous game Star Wars: Empire at War and wondered if they could create a faction based around "land capital ships". The Hierarchy's tactical dynamic in turn is based on requests for the ability to customize weapon hardpoints. *The Hierarchy's heavy units seems to resemblance Tripods from the novel "The War of the Worlds". The closest resemblance is the Defiler. * The Hierarchy is ruled by a group referred to as the Overseers, though the exact nature of their political system is unknown. * According to one of the Developers, the Hiearchy find cows to be "beings of pure energy" that happen to taste good, hence their 500 RM value (live or dead). * Interestingly, none of the Hierarchy's units speak intelligible words. Instead, infantry and walkers produce sounds that is likely their races own language and vehicle units produce various mechanical noises. As notable exceptions, all hero units telepathically speak in whatever language the game is in and Defilers produce slurping, gurgling noises. *The Hierarchy has been compared to the Covenant from Halo, based on naming similarities for some of their infantry (e.g. Grunts, Brutes), governing system (the Overseers), and personality similarities between Kamal Re'x and the Covenant leader; the Prophet of Truth. *All the hierarchy vehicles have a radioactive core as stated ingame and the humming sound they emmit is probably because that device. *The Hierarchy is the only faction to not have the 3 heroes playable on the campaign (Kamal Re'x, Nufai) *In the second human mission during the Habitat Walker's invasion to the military base of the humans,even though the player do destroy all the walker's parts,the walker will be still moving even if the humans continue to hit its destroyed parts until they destroy its cores. *In the second Hierarchy Mission, human units can destroy the your walkers even without the assistance of Novus units. *According to one of the developers, that while it is widely believed that the energy and heat from the plasma cannon is what causes the rapid flesh loss, it’s actually not. The weapon casing of the plasma charge is made up of a material found mostly on the Grunt’s home world. It was found that when subjected to extreme heat (such as unleashed plasma fired from a shotgun), the casing material reacted with oxygen from any source (air, water vapor, lung contents, etc.) resulting in a localized gas cloud of highly corrosive material. This combined with the radiation that is common in Hierarchy weapons vaporizes flesh almost instantly, but goes inert soon after creation and before it has time to sufficiently do more than blacken the calcium in bones. This occurs almost instantaneously which is why it is normally impossible to detect anything but the results while observing combat. While it is a common side-effect, it is does not happen all the time since the amount of oxygen can vary from location to location (and in fact does not function at all in space, where only the impact of the plasma causes damage). Category:Races Category:Hierarchy